Going Broke, But Teaching Economics
by Don Rich
His life as an adjunct collapsed with bitter irony one day when his dean called him into his office to tell him that a colleague had caught him sleeping in the faculty lounge. The dean dressed him down viciously, and then, despite his always having done as he was told and taught everywhere asked, cut his classes from three to one, then none. And all for helping a deaf girl. When he was first hired to teach at the college, he had been so excited. Before that,
he had put his teaching career on hold to take care of his children—a job that, as they say, is the toughest you’ll ever love. At first, he was almost paralyzed with nerves, shuffling his notes and responding to questions only after long, unexplainable pauses. But after the second class, he began to find his groove again.
When he and his wife divorced, he poured the passion of his grief into his teaching, and the combination of increased experience and devotion to the task began to bear fruit. Soon, the classroom was alive, with students on the edges of their seats and laughing at his jokes—really getting the material in spite of the poverty of their educational backgrounds. Some- thing special was happening.
Soon, students began to come up to him after class to shake his hand and compare him favorably to full-time faculty members. He always strove to be professional in these circumstances, avoiding the temptation to gloat, instead saying, “Well, sometimes the material strikes people differently. Professor X is quite good, very dedicated to his work.” Inside, though, he glowed with pride, knowing that he was becoming the professor he had always dreamed he would be.
As he poured more and more of himself into his work, the colleges he taught for seemed to care less and less. It became obvious that, for all the talk of “work with us, be flexible, just hang in there,” there was no hope of a full-time job.
He rushed hither and thither for the colleges, always doing as he was asked and unwittingly rendering himself unemployable at any place other than a convenience store, where he took a job as a desperate maneuver, working on the weekends so he would still be able to do what he loved, which was teach.
Things got worse when the convenience store cut his hours in an attempt to lever him on to the dreaded night shift, the graveyard shift. At first he didn’t mind; it was quiet between the bar and morning rushes, and he could get work done. There he was: a store clerk reading constitutional law and advanced economics. He stood out, a college professor and register jockey.
But gradually, the tedium began to wear on him. He would nod off at the register during the morning rush, out cold on his feet. One winter, he rushed home from work and fell asleep in the shower before class, snapping awake only as the hot water ran out and he felt the suddenonslaught of cold in the house he could no longer afford to heat.
He watched his friends’ lives progress and became increasingly terrified of his future. Once, he saw an adjunct get cut: a fifty year old man sitting before his own coordinator and bleating out, “But I did what you asked. I taught wherever and whenever you wanted.”
He shuddered as he realized that, someday, he too could be this adjunct. He thought to himself, “Sorry, old friend, but you held on to a fantasy too long. You dreamed of being a college professor, and now you are fifty years old, with no transferable job skills, no retirement, no health insurance, and you may well die alone and in poverty. Not me.”
Increasingly, the uncertainty wore on him: praying he wouldn’t get sick because he had no medical; watching his bank account drop to zero; fearing the loss of his house, the only part of his kids’ childhood that lived on.
The last summer class had started out with such promise. He remembered Chris Rock once saying that, if you dropped out of high school, you could never go to a real college, only the community college, where everybody in the community could go. While he rejected Mr. Rock’s contempt for the quality of instruction, having been told by former students that they missed the community college setting compared to the impersonal atmosphere of the typical four-year research institution, his class that summer sure did have everybody in the community: Africans fleeing civil war; Brazilians trying to make a better life; students who were Harvard material but trying to save money; the great midrange of students as concerned about beer as class; the marginal students who almost didn’t belong there. And a deaf girl.
In many ways, the class was unremarkable. Some days, the air was almost electric, student and teacher participating in a mind-altering experience. Other days, there was a professional rendering of required material, part of the industrial process of modern education. Once or twice, he got only blank stares from his audience.
On the days of blank stares, he comforted himself by recalling a hippie uncle’s story about attending a Jimi Hendrix show and watching Hendrix walk off stage when the crowd yawned. “Sometimes, man, the performer and the audience just aren’t in the same groove,” his uncle told him.
His lectures for the deaf girl might as well have been taking place in ancient Greek. The college had promised an interpreter, but he never got one—this, in spite of the college’s professed mission of making education accessible to the disabled.
So he went the extra distance, meeting the deaf girl after class, meeting her outside of office hours. Anything. He always thought the motto of the community college ought to be like the Rangers: No man left behind.
And then came his Waterloo. He drove down to the college at his own expense, on his own time, for one last meeting so that, as an ethical instructor, he could honestly say she had passed the class.
They worked together for an hour and a half, her thoughts gradually coalescing. They had their eureka moment while
discussing indifference curves, and, in the charmingly muffled
voice of the deaf she exclaimed, “I get it!” For a moment, they transcended barriers of class and disability. He would cherish it forever.
Afterwards, he was exhausted, but still had more to do. He had to research to finish the Ph.D., or he would never get anywhere. So he retreated to the adjunct lounge, always second-class accomm-odations, to read. He made it for two hours, but then his eyelids involuntarily drooped, and he dozed off.
An administrator peered through the tiny rectangular aperture of the door, and caught him. Like any good hall monitor, she ratted him out. His dedication? Forget about it. His desire to teach the deaf girl? Forget about it. The long, tedious nights at the convenience store? Forget about that, too. He was done. That was all.
